The comprehensive plan constitutes the planner's central public role. The planner's commitment is to interdisciplinary problem solving that includes both the short and long-term.  The comprehensive plan provides a frame of reference within which a city, town, county or even a regional collection of such bodies, can make decisions – decisions about how to spend public resources, where to encourage development and where to discourage it, where to invest in new infrastructure, and how to regulate private land use and development.  The comprehensive plan weaves together the process of physical analysis of the natural and human-made environments with the multiple goals of the many constituencies who inhabit and depend upon the community for which the plan is developed.  Although the comprehensive plan itself typically emphasizes the physical and fiscal tools to be used by the community to implement it, the policies within the plan are guided by socio-economic factors and by social needs, as well as by the physical context.  Comprehensive Planning draws broadly on many of the planning methods courses offered in the curriculum and is informed by a century of planning theory that have evolved with the practice in the United States.  Comprehensive Planning also draws on specialized tools such as GIS (for analysis), modeling (for examining possible futures), survey techniques (for analysis of public needs and desires) and urban design in some contexts. 

The ensuing chart describes the core and elective courses for this ACS, beyond the common core curriculum and as applied to both standard and accelerated tracks: